'Uh-uh, no way, Malloy. You give, you get. No one-way streets.'
'You have the wrong address, Pigeyes. I don't know a thing about this guy beyond what I told you last time.' I raised two fingers. 'Scout's honor.'
'You know what I think, Malloy. I'm thinkin, you're dirty here.' Pigeyes's instincts were highly reliable and his inclination to view me with suspicion did not need to be explained. ‘I think it's adding up. We been looking for your friend Mr Kamin.' Pigeyes placed his hands on his knees. He put his face right in mine. His breath was heavy; his flesh was laden with a dense, cruel light. 'You wouldn't happen to have been in his apartment in the last couple days?'
I'd known for seventy-two hours this was coming, but the papers were already writing about Archie, and the homicide dicks have all got deals with the reporters — dinner and drinks and spell the name right before the sixth graph — and I thought for sure we'd be hearing an item on News Radio 98, with one of the secretaries scooting down the hall going, Oh my God, did you hear about Bert's place? So this one caught me by surprise.
You probably know it already, U You, but I really am crazy. Saying that, I mean what people usually do, not that I act without reason, but that my reasons, lined up with each other, don't make too much sense. Contradictory, you'd say. In conflict. I'm such a smart-guy who has all the answers, then I whistle in the dark with all these fears racing inside me and, worse yet, pull stunts like breaking into hotel rooms and apartments that would give the heebie-jeebies to the daring young man on the flying trapeze. But now and then even a knucklehead like me gets a wake-up call from reality and without warning I felt, in the radiance of Pigeyes's usual aura of menace, that I was in danger. Somehow with all my preoccupations, my good-time visions about what I'd do when I caught Bert, I hadn't recognized the opportunity I'd handed Gino. I'd known he'd vet me, give me a proctoscope, the third degree. But I had touched a lot of things in Bert's apartment. Doorknobs inside and out. The mail. Homicide was there now, taking lifts off every surface. My sworn enemy, Detective Gino Dimonte, finds a dead body, my prints, and evidence of a lot of peculiar behavior on my part. Guess what comes next? The panic arrived with the same sudden welling power as tears.
'I told you, the guy's my partner. I go to his place all the time.' Gino knew just what I was up to. If I admitted I was in the apartment recently, I'd give him the break-and-enter cold, a forcible felony, and a leg up on the murder, since I put myself close to the body. If I denied it, I'd have no way to explain my prints.
'Bull,' Pigeyes said. 'You're such a pal of his, you know his friends? You know a bookie named Vernon Koechell?'
'No.'
'Never heard of him?'
'Don't know him.'
'That's not what I asked, Malloy.'
I'd been down at the Russian Bath talking about Archie, and it would not take too much bullying to turn somebody's memory around about who'd brought up the name. Pigeyes could monkey with a lot of things, in fact, the evidence techs and the path reports. The people who owed him and played his way were all over the department, and I'd broken their code. A lift off the doorknob could be identified as coming from the refrigerator or the vegetable crisper. My hairs found in the kitchen might eventually appear on Mr Koechell's lapel. I suddenly knew why there'd been no news flash about Archie's body. It would be easy to mum this in the papers, for a few hours anyway, if the coppers needed time to lay hands on the killer. In the folds beneath my chin, I could feel a slick of telltale dampness beginning to gather.
'This bird Koechell — I been looking for him. Did you know that?'
'No.' I was relieved to give one honest answer.
'Some questions I need to ask him about his buddy Kam Roberts.'
In the midst of all this sensation, mixed up and intense, I suddenly knew what Pigeyes was investigating — at least what it had been to start. It came into clear view like a birdie flapping through a cold sky as I recalled my conversation with Toots. Fixing games. Kam Roberts and Archie. That's why it was being looked at out of Financial Crimes instead of Vice. 'Kam's Special — U five.' Bert maybe had been in on this too.
'I got lucky, sort of. One of those good news, bad news things. Run into some rummy asshole I used to know, sort of sweat him a second, and bingo, this guy gives me the name of Robert Kamin, tells me go look for this dude, seems he knows Kam Roberts. And I do. I even take a look round Robert Kamin's place.'
'With a warrant?' I asked. It was a question, an obstacle. The fear was still all over me now, like a brick on my heart.
Pigeyes sneered. 'Listen, jagbag, a warrant for his apartment don't make any difference for you.' We both knew he was right. 'Here. Show him the warrant.'
Dewey reached for a briefcase next to the passenger's seat. I closed my eyes briefly, in spite of myself.
'Now I'm asking you again, Malloy, you didn't happen to be in that apartment, did you?'
I was a copper during those years when it was starting that the police had to give somebody arrested Miranda. I never saw the point. It was a nice idea, I recognized that, put everybody on the same footing, rich guy and poor, they'd all know the same rules. But the problem was human nature, not social class. Because a man in a corner is never going to shut up. If he shuts up, if he says what I knew I should say, call my lawyer, then he's going to the station, he's going to get booked, he's going to court. For a guy in a jam, there's only one way out, to keep explaining, hoping that somehow bullshit buys liberty.
'Pigeyes, what do you think I did?'
'I asked if you were in that apartment.' He pointed at Dewey to make a note. 'That's twice he's not answering.'
'Gino, I'm the guy who gave you Bert's name and told you to go shag him. Write
'Malloy, nothing with you makes sense. You're not a sensible guy. You tell me why you send some punk with pimples on his ass to run all over the city with that fucking credit card? You tell me why the guy I'm looking for and the guy you're looking for got the same names inside out? You tell me why you're looking for this Robert Kamin in the first place? Or how come you don't know nothing about his asshole pal Vernon Koechell? You tell me why you're fronting for this fucking homo?'
Homo. I wasn't making the reference. I didn't know if he meant Archie or Kam or Bert.
'Now maybe,' said Pigeyes, 'third time's the charm. We'll try it again, and listen up. Yes or no. Last few days, were you in that apartment?'
I felt like he'd shoved his whole fist into my throat.
'Pigeyes, do I need a lawyer?'
'Hey, I thought you were a lawyer.' All three of them laughed. The black guy covered his face with his hand. My, my, my. He was wearing a square diamond ring that was bright on his fingers. 'See, here's why I ask. Cause I looked all over that place, Kamin's. Checked the dust on the window ledges, postmarks on the mail. I opened the fridge to see any food spoiled, pull date on the milk carton and orange juice. Know what I found?'
'No,' I said. Without looking away from me he pointed at Dewey to make another note. I tried to be resolute but he was drilling holes in my peepers, reading every thought in my head. He knew he had me. He'd seen me frightened before. He knew the look and he savored it. And I knew him too. I'd watched him drag these poor kids into the station for questioning and go put on a stained butcher's apron he kept in his locker, knowing there was nothing these young bloods wouldn't believe about the Kindle police. He had the same expression. He was going to deliver the rabbit punch now, the body, and how the path report, the hair samples, the digestive track enzymes, somehow spelled Malloy. He bent close, he put his harsh face right back in mine. Mr Stranger Danger in person.
'Not a fuckin thing,' he said. 'That's what I found: not a goddamn fuckin thing. This guy's gone two weeks at least. And if you ain't been in that apartment, you tell me how you come up with a credit card that the bank says they only mailed twelve days ago?' He took a real bite on the words and smiled a little bit as he did it. And so did I.
B. He Looks Like Kam Roberts
